My Strength

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Wednesday, March 6, 2013

A FACEBOOK FRIEND

Facebook takes almost all my
evenings. Somehow I can’t get over this addiction. I believe facebook boosts
our morale and self esteem and quenches our Narcissistic thirst. Don’t you feel
really important and happy to see the trident of red lights showing friend
requests, messages and notifications? How much do we wish to see the LIKEs on
our fotos and posts! A friend request from a long lost school mate!! I am
pampered by facebook. Every time I am online, I feel I am surrounded by a
cheering crowd.

It was for my winter vacation I
reached Bangalore. Lots of plans charted out. Hardly had I met the first few
priorities for the vacation, I got a call from my father that my nephew is not
well and is hospitalized at Kochi. As I was sensing a chill pass through my
bones, my father increased the gravity of the news. It seems he had met with an
accident and is in critical condition. A few minutes later came a call from my
uncle that my nephew is no more!! He burst into a wail.

My nephew was just 29 years old!!
I felt giddy!! That reticent boy with his inhibited smile! Though he has grown
thin last time I saw him a year ago, I can’t erase the chubby child he was when
he used to be our angelic doll to play with. My nieces and brothers used to
find him cute and charming. Over the years he had become more withdrawn and his
mysterious taciturnity would inflate at many a family gatherings. I used to
wonder what made that bubbly child so quiet though he enjoyed the jokes we
cracked.

“Last evening we spoke and he said he would be home
next week and then we can decide upon the girl he saw last”, his father
recollected as he sat pale in front of me.

Except for a few blood stains left
by the postmortem, his face was calm. The journey from the front yard to the cremation
ground seemed like eternity. When the moonlight shone on the river, we were
waiting for him to turn into ash. With the towels on our shoulders, we sat
scattered wondering at this incredibility. As I sat brooding, I was hit by
incessant questions. This is the place where we had cremated our maternal
grandma, an abiding presence in my life. She is my childhood, her voice
chanting the evening prayers and her patting me for my devotion. We came home
after leaving him on the river bank. Where else can we go? We can’t follow him.
Even if we could, where would we go? Who bids farewell to whom? The dead to the
living or the living to the dead?

Days after his mother’s face
became blank and his father moved about in atheistic indignation, I returned to
Bangalore. His post mortem report said it was a cardiac arrest in sleep!!! In
the morning his roommates found their usually punctual friend still in bed. The
postmortem revealed that his beats stopped within a couple of hours after he
went to bed. It was true but it sounded like a cruel medical joke!

He became a sigh in our
conversations and I was drawn to chores in Bangalore. I had to return to
Kathmandu within a couple of weeks.

One evening, after having read
all the notifications and messages on my facebook page, I was greedy for more.
Among the many “to be confirmed” friend requests, I found an old request from one
Mr. Rohit. I sat paralysed as I was looking at the familiar face of my nephew
we/who bade farewell on the river bank!!!